Independence and Freedom

"True independence and freedom can only exist in doing what's right."

Brigham Young

image from: josephsmith.net

Be Prepared

"The will to win is not as important as the will to prepare to win."

UCLA Coach John Wooden  
Click to learn more about Coach John Wooden 

1959–1960	UCLA	14–12	7–5	2
1960–1961	UCLA	18–8	7–5	2
1961–1962	UCLA	18–11	10–2	1	NCAA 4th Place
1962–1963	UCLA	20–9	8–5	T–1	NCAA Regional 4th Place
1963–1964	UCLA	30–0	15–0	1	NCAA Champions
1964–1965	UCLA	28–2	14–0	1	NCAA Champions
1965–1966	UCLA	18–8	10–4	2
1966–1967	UCLA	30–0	14–0	1	NCAA Champions
1967–1968	UCLA	29–1	14–0	1	NCAA Champions
1968–1969	UCLA	29–1	13–1	1	NCAA Champions
1969–1970	UCLA	28–2	12–2	1	NCAA Champions
1970–1971	UCLA	29–1	14–0	1	NCAA Champions
1971–1972	UCLA	30–0	14–0	1	NCAA Champions
1972–1973	UCLA	30–0	14–0	1	NCAA Champions
1973–1974	UCLA	26–4	12–2	1	NCAA 3rd Place
1974–1975	UCLA	28–3	12–2	1	NCAA Champions

Table from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wooden (June 8, 2010)

image from http://fcweb.sd36.bc.ca/schoolwebsites/georgesvanier-web/quotes

The First Law of Success

"The first law of success...is concentration; to bend all the energies to one point, and to go directly to that point, looking neither to the right nor the left."

--William Matthews

Character Education

"Intelligence plus character--that is the goal of true education."


Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Message to Students from Mr. Raul E. Correa, Principal

Mr. Raul E. Corea, Principal

Steve Haymore Casts

Honesty is More Important than Victory

Davis calls penalty on himself, gives up shot at first PGA win

By Jay Busbee

“Honesty is more important than victory.”

Imagine standing on the edge of achieving your life's dream. You make a small mistake that will cost you your dream -- but if you don't say anything, you might just get away with it. Would you own up to the mistake, or would you keep quiet and hope for the best?

Brian Davis isn't the best-known name in golf -- or even the hundredth-best-known -- but after Sunday, he ought to move up the list a few notches. Davis was facing Jim Furyk in a playoff at the Verizon Heritage, and was trying to notch his first-ever PGA Tour win.

Davis's approach shot on the first hole of the playoff bounced off the green and nestled in among some weeds. (You can see the gunk he was hitting out of in that shot above.) When Davis tried to punch the ball up onto the green, his club may have grazed a stray weed on his backswing.

So what's the big deal? This: hitting any material around your ball during your backswing constitutes a violation of the rule against moving loose impediments, and is an immediate two-stroke penalty. And in a playoff, that means, in effect, game over.

Okay, you can think that's a silly penalty or whatever, but that's not the point of this story. The point is that Davis actually called the violation on himself.

"It was one of those things I thought I saw movement out of the corner of my eye," Davis said. "And I thought we’d check on TV, and indeed there was movement." Immediately after the shot, Davis called over a rules official, who conferred with television replays and confirmed the movement -- but movement which was only visible on slow-motion. Unbelievable.

As soon as the replays confirmed the violation, Davis conceded the victory to Furyk, who was somewhat stunned -- but, make no mistake, grateful for the win.

"To have the tournament come down that way is definitely not the way I wanted to win," Furyk said. "It’s obviously a tough loss for him and I respect and admire what he did."

Furyk took home  $1.03 million for the win. Davis won't exactly have to beg for change to get a ride home; he won $615,000 for second place. And he may have won much more than that by taking the honorable route.

To be sure, this isn't quite in the same category as J.P. Hayes, the golfer who disqualified himself from qualifying school after learning -- in his hotel room, all alone -- that he had played a nonqualifying ball; or Adam Van Houten, who cost his team an Ohio state title when he admitted signing an incorrect scorecard.  For starters, Davis's shot was on television, and while he could have "not noticed" the movement, the TV cameras still did, and someone might have called him on it later on.

But the bigger deal is this -- the guy gave away a chance at winning his first-ever PGA Tour event because he knew that in golf, honesty is more important than victory. It's a tough lesson to learn, but here's hoping he gets accolades -- and, perhaps, some sponsorship deals -- that more than make up for the victory he surrendered.

We Must be Readers

T.H. Bell, former U.S. Secretary of Education said, 

"Time must be scheduled for reading, quiet reflection, and conversation on what is read. Despite the glamour of the electronic marvels of today, a great book in quiet contact with a curious and hungry mind is still the highest use of leisure time. Whatever other pressures there may be on our time, we must never let a significant period of time pass without reading a good book. We must be readers, and what we read should be carefully planned to help us in our quest for excellence. Reading can be a stimulating source of conversation and intellectual growth. "

["Keys to Attaining Excellence in Our Lives"]

Work Hard: The Price for Being an Academic Champion

Rick Mount, National High School Basketball Player of the...

Steve Haymore Casts

Joe Reed: Athletic and Academic Champions

Click the > play button below and listen to the wisdom of Coach Joe Reed, Boys' Varsity Basketball Coach and School-wide Athletic Director. Coach Reed shares excellent insights for being a successful student-athlete, for being an athletic champion and an Academic Champion, principles that one can use for a lifetime to enjoy happy and successful living.

HPHS Podcast 2: Coach Joe Reed

Steve Haymore's Podcast

How to Be Brilliant

How to Be Brilliant

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/books/review/Paul-t.html

By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL

Published: March 18, 2010

You’ve probably heard it at one time or another: Most of us use only 10 percent of our brains. More factoid than fact, a claim of unknown provenance and dubious accuracy, the idea sticks around because of the enduring appeal of its underlying premise. We’d all love to think that we’re in possession of tremendous untapped potential, of latent mental powers just waiting to be activated. It seems so convenient, like falling in love with the person you’re already married to, or whipping up dinner from what’s already in your kitchen. You don’t have to leave home, or even change out of your pajamas.

THE GENIUS IN ALL OF US

Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong

By David Shenk

David Shenk’s Web Site

Motivational gurus from Dale Carnegie to Tony Robbins have long promised access to these hidden stores of genius. Now here comes David Shenk with “The Genius in All of Us,” which argues that we have before us not a “talent scarcity” but a “latent talent abundance.” Our problem “isn’t our inadequate genetic assets,” but “our inability, so far, to tap into what we already have.” The truth is “that few of us know our true limits, that the vast majority of us have not even come close to tapping what scientists call our ‘un­actualized potential.’ ” At first it would seem that Shenk, the author of thoughtful books on information overload, memory loss and chess, has veered into guru territory. But he has assembled a large body of research to back up his claims.

Two bodies, in fact. The first concerns the emerging science of epigenetics, the study of how the environment modifies the way genes are expressed. Since the days of Crick and Watson, we’ve tended to see genes as a set of straightforward instructions, a blueprint for constructing a person. Over the last 20 years, however, some scientists have begun to complicate that picture. “It turns out that the genetic instructions themselves are influenced by other inputs,” Shenk writes. “Genes are constantly activated and deactivated by environmental stimuli, nutrition, hormones, nerve impulses and other genes.” That means there can be no guaranteed genetic windfalls, or fixed genetic limits, bestowed at the moment of conception. Instead there is a continually unfolding interaction between our heredity and our world, a process that may be in some measure under our control.

The second body of research investigates the nature of exceptional ability and how it arises. We’ve traditionally regarded superior talent as a rare and mysterious gift bequeathed to a lucky few. In fact, Shenk writes, science is revealing it to be the product of highly concentrated effort. He describes the work of the psychologist Anders Ericsson, who wondered if he could train an ordinary person to perform extraordinary feats of memory. When Eric­sson began working with a young man identified as S.F., his subject could, like most of us, hold only seven numbers in his short-term memory. By the end of the study, S.F. could correctly recall an astonishing 80-plus digits. With the right kind of mental discipline, Ericsson and his co-­investigator concluded, “there is seemingly no limit to memory performance.” Shenk weaves accounts of such laboratory experiments, conducted on average people, with the tales of singularly accomplished individuals — Ted Williams and Michael Jordan, Mozart and Beethoven — who all worked relentlessly to hone their skills.

Bring these two domains together, and a new vision of achievement begins to come into focus. Shenk’s “ambitious goal,” he tells us, is to take this widely dispersed research and “distill it all into a new lingua franca, adopting helpful new phrases and metaphors” to replace old and misleading ones. Forget about genes as unchanging “blueprints” and talent as a “gift,” all tied up in a bow. “We cannot allow ourselves to think that way anymore,” he declares with some fervor. Instead, Shenk proposes, imagine the genome as a giant control board, with thousands of switches and knobs that turn genes off and on or tune them up and down. And think of talent not as a thing, but as a process; not as something we have, but as something we do.

It’s ambitious indeed to try to overthrow in one go the conventional ideas and images that have accumulated since 1874, when Francis Galton first set the words “nature” and “nurture” against each other. Yet Shenk convinces the reader that such a coup is necessary, and he gets it well under way. He tells engaging stories, lucidly explains complex research and offers fresh insights into the nature of exceptional performance: noting, for example, that profound achievements are often driven by petty jealousies and resentments, or pointing out the surprising fact that great talent seems to cluster geographically and temporally, undermining the assumption that it’s all due to individual genetic endowments. Just how tall a task Shenk took on is evident in his voluminous endnotes, which go on as long as the main text and are just as interesting. Here the author allows us to watch him working his way through the literature, inquiring, arguing, marveling, as he wrestles a new understanding into being.

Shenk doesn’t neglect the take-home point we’re all waiting for, even titling a chapter “How to Be a Genius (or Merely Great).” The answer has less in common with the bromides of motivational speakers than with the old saw about how to get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. Whatever you wish to do well, Shenk writes, you must do over and over again, in a manner involving, as Ericsson put it, “repeated attempts to reach beyond one’s current level,” which results in “frequent failures.” This is known as “deliberate practice,” and over time it can actually produce changes in the brain, making new heights of achievement possible. Behold our long rumored potential, unleashed at last! Shenk is vague about how, exactly, this happens, but to his credit he doesn’t make it sound easy.

“You have to want it, want it so bad you will never give up, so bad that you are ready to sacrifice time, money, sleep, friendships, even your reputation,” he writes. “You will have to adopt a particular lifestyle of ambition, not just for a few weeks or months but for years and years and years. You have to want it so bad that you are not only ready to fail, but you actually want to experience failure: revel in it, learn from it.”

It’s in this self-help section that two weaknesses in Shenk’s argument become evident. The first is the matter of where the extreme drive and discipline that greatness requires are supposed to come from. Shenk tells us about

Beethoven writing 60 to 70 drafts of a single phrase of music, and Ted Williams hitting practice pitches until his hands bled.

Shenk would be the last to argue that such fierce dedication is “inborn” or “innate” — but if it isn’t, are the rest of us all equally capable of mustering it? We certainly can’t retroactively grant ourselves the kind of intense childhood exposure that Shenk describes for many of his greats, like Mozart and Yo-Yo Ma.

Shenk is also evasive about just what restrictions individual biology places on achievement. He is careful to say that we are not born without limits — it’s just that none of us can know what those limits are “before we’ve applied enormous re­sources and invested vast amounts of time.” He ducks the implication that these limits will, eventually, reveal themselves, and that they will stop most of us well short of Mozart territory. There’s a tension here between Shenk’s extravagant talk of “greatness” and “genius” and the more modest message he delivers: practice can improve your performance, perhaps far more than you imagined.

Still, it doesn’t feel as if Shenk is making false promises, perhaps because he so sincerely follows his own advice.

In an oddly touching footnote, he relates his own struggle to achieve. “My attitude toward my own writing is simple: I assume that everything I write is rubbish until I have demonstrated otherwise. I will routinely write and rewrite a sentence, paragraph and/or chapter 20, 30, 40 times — as many times as it takes to feel satisfied.”

Such efforts have resulted in a deeply interesting and important book. David Shenk may not be a genius yet, but give him time.